


and it suits me

by 1001cranes



Category: Everworld Series - K. A. Applegate
Genre: Animal Play, Animal Transformation, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-01
Updated: 2011-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-22 02:22:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/232656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1001cranes/pseuds/1001cranes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His knees are already blackened with dirt, palms torn and bloodied like the Christ who had once ripped Fenrir’s world apart. As David does now. As if he holds Fenrir’s still-beating heart in his hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and it suits me

Fenrir dislikes being human.

It’s not that he can’t be. His father is a shape-shifter, and though Fenrir was born a wolf he has far more control than Jörmungandr and Sleipnir – even Hel. He grew large, as a wolf does, but he can be small. He can be frail. He can be human. It is only that he rarely finds a reason to.

David, somehow, has become that reason.

Fenrir paid little attention to the General when he was brought over. Human. Male, but weak. Smelled like the witch. Smelled like enchantment, and fear, and piss. But David has changed. Fenrir knows that is the way of men – to change. Gods do not change, they only are. They change only as their followers may will them, and it is in the nature of followers to fear change. A helpless loop.

David has changed for the better, since then. Stronger, harder, smarter. Still cloaked in something that Fenrir might label despair, a bitter understirring that waxes and wanes. Whether the wheel of time will change David again – make him weak, make him strong, pull him away from this place – Fenrir does not know.

It is for David, then, that he will be human. Not for his father. Not for this war. There are others, before, he had seduced as a human, but none who knew him as Fenrir. None who knew him as the beast that hid so neatly beneath the skin.

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“General,” he says, and even though it is a human word from a human mouth, it trips over his teeth in a way it would not from his fangs.

“David,” he says, and meets Fenrir’s eyes. The same eyes he always has, no matter what his form. Wolf’s eyes, improbable eyes of rust and gold. “Call me David,” and Fenrir understands. There is a space between his title and how another wolf would know him – his scent, his rank in the pack, his posture. Humans rely on words, far too many words, and Fenrir is not nearly as skilled as his father at deciphering them. But David is blunt, and simple, and sometimes even brutal. Fenrir understands that, and him.

He uses too many teeth – too many teeth that are too sharp. Too much tongue. His hands feel clumsy, the fingers wriggly. Unnecessary. When he is human he prefers them clenched in fists, but he knows that will not do here. He drags the palms of his hands over David’s face, down his chest, over his hips, to the hardness between his legs. He enjoys the way David groans, the heaving of his chest, the beating of his blood – when David rolls onto his back, Fenrir bites David’s throat with his blunted human teeth, bites so hard there are moments David can’t even breathe. He bites the soft of David’s belly like he could tear out the intestines and eat them, still bloody beating red.

Does Fenrir ask? Or does David _know_ – does David get on all fours with no prompting at all? Fenrir doesn't remember. But he bites David on the back of the neck, hard, and watches David’s head drop. Fenrir drags his teeth over each knob of David’s spine, teeth over tissue, until he can run his tongue between the cleft of David’s ass, over and into the opening there. Shoving his fingers inside, greedy, until he can push into David, _needing_ to, his own cock heavy and hot between his legs.

He spends himself quickly, too quickly to bring David much pleasure, but Fenrir’s fingers are skilled enough for that – to grasp David, to stroke, to run one fingernail just inside of the slit and spread the liquid there over the head. And when David is the one to spend, this time, Fenrir delicately licks his fingers, the palm of his hand, just to taste the bitterness that is categorically mortal, categorically man, but only David, to him.

David fits against his body like it was tailored so, or maybe Fenrir shifts to meet him. He runs one hand over the back of David's head, nails digging into the scalp, so David’s hair stands on end and Fenrir breathes deeply at the musky scent that rises.

“Will you let me hunt you?” he asks, and the shiver that runs down David's spine is one that will echo in Fenrir's bones for a long time.

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Fenrir does not do this lightly. He did not ask it lightly. He is a god, and even for a minor ones -- or perhaps more often so -- whims have a dangerous way of turning out.

It's a three-quarters moon. Enough to see by, but not a full moon, no. Though he always chases Máni, as Máni always chases Sól, it would be madness to ignore the magic inherent in a full moon. Fenrir is many things -- a dangerous killer, a bloodthirsty animal -- but he leaves the true madness to his father, even if he has a tendency to follow in that madness.

They left after dinner on foot, into the waning dusk. Loki mockingly raised a glass as they left, and the dark, sharp-eyed one was ill-pleased, but there was nothing to say. Nothing that David would listen to. He is like a rock, David. As steadfast, as blunt. As likely to be shattered when he is finally smashed up against something harder than himself.

The edge of the woods separates sharply from the path, like the edge of a sudden shadow. They stand there, for a moment, and Fenrir shifts from foot to foot uneasily. Crouches closer to the ground.

"Cold?" David asks, his own fists twisting inside of his pockets.

Gods do not get cold. He feels naked – stripped bare, like this, and that is the difference. He burrows further into his coat of sheepskin, but it feels wrong against his skin. He feels weak without his fur, with his wet human eyes, his useless nose, his blunted teeth. He is uncertain, and that is something he cannot stand. His two feet are steady, of course. He is still strong – stronger, in some ways, if not as fast. These are his woods, but it has been eons since he walked them on two feet. If there are any mortals in them now, there will certainly be none by the morning.

Fenrir takes one of David’s hands into his own, pulls it to his mouth and runs his teeth just over the protruding bone of the wrist. “We call this the wolf-joint. My followers used to cut themselves, here, and sacrifice me blood.” _Would you like to make a sacrifice?_ his smile seems to be asking,

“On all fours?” David offers, deadly serious, and that is what Fenrir likes about him. The gravity he exudes. The sudden and perfect understanding he has of Fenrir. It's a dangerous thing. Possibly a deadly thing. And there is little that Fenrir has craved more than a true death, more than the ragnarok that will one day come for them all.

He growls, and David clambers off as best as he is able.

Fenrir digs the sharpest points of his nails into his palms. He knows he must give David a proper head start, or this will be over too quickly, far too quickly. It will be over too soon however long he waits, but concessions must be made.

He breathes. Tries to center himself in the universe, the way he once could in the Old World. Everworld resists, as always – it was made piecemeal, made quickly and unsteadily, a patchwork chimera trying to rip itself to pieces. He wonders if David, too, feels this displacement. The simultaneous pride and shame that comes from carving out a spot in a world that was not yours to carve.

Distantly, he notices the blood that drips down over his wrist. He has clenched his fists so tightly the nails have pierced the skin. He can wait no longer, it seems.

David is dressed properly for the time of night, for the sharp weather – boots, cumbersome but necessary, and Fenrir follows their sound until the scent of David’s blood overpowers the thumping in his ears. Even as a man the woods are Fenrir’s domain, and he runs through the forest as if the trees were blades of grass, as if the rocks were mere pebbles in his path.

He smells David before he sees him. The sweat, and excitement, and a touch of fear. It makes Fenrir forget himself, for a moment, and he tackles David with no thought to any safety. His knees are already blackened with dirt, palms torn and bloodied like the Christ who had once ripped Fenrir’s world apart. As David does now. As if he holds Fenrir’s still-beating heart in his hands.

Fenrir pulls David's hands out from under him, ignoring the graceless way David's chest hits the dirt, and licks the palms clean. Long, wet licks that taste of copper blood, iron earth, the strange savory and salt of human flesh. He licks until David goes quiet beneath him, so quiet, his heart beating so hard his lungs can't keep up, and Fenrir wants to tear at his throat until the noises caught there spring free.

When he breathes the frozen air curls over David like smoke, and David blinks languidly, as though roused from some slumber. He puts his mouth to David’s, then, and the sounds Fenrir has been waiting for break free.

It is not Fenrir’s intention to cause David pain this night. Not when David has already given so much, and Fenrir has been so tempted. Bad enough that they might spill seed; Fenrir is loath to spill blood this night, to invoke something beyond his reckoning.

He runs his hands up the inside of David’s thighs, wedging them open, pressing himself against the sac, there, and rutting. “Like this,” he hisses, and pushes David’s thighs back together with his hands. They’re strong, from spending days on horseback, and warm, so warm compared to everything around them. Fenrir uses his knees to hold David’s thighs tighter together, to press David into the ground, and writhes. The friction of it is almost pain, but not quite, not really – it’s _beautiful_ , fingers digging into the dirt, stones cutting into his knees, David heaving under him until he spends into the ground, until Fenrir’s release slickens the spaces between his legs.

In this moment, perhaps, Fenrir and Everworld could exist as one.

When he is again himself, only himself, David lies still in the dirt. Breathing heavily, hips twitching against the ground. Pressing the heat of his face and his cock into the cold earth.

"Sleep," Fenrir murmurs, shifting from man to wolf and drawing out the sibilance of the word until it melts away into the wind. "Sleep, General. David," he corrects, whistling through his wolf's mouth. Through his teeth.

David rolls over onto his belly and glares. "It's like forty fucking degrees out here."

Fenrir blinks.

"It's _cold_."

"Of course," Fenrir says, though truthfully, he forgets how mortals can be bothered by these things. "Just a moment." The shift is seamless -- so quick that Fenrir barely feels the pain of it, the twinge and stretch of growing larger. Not too large, he decides, out of deference for David. Just large enough. David curls in on himself like a newborn, and tangles his fingers in fur.

'You're going to have to drag me back to the castle tomorrow," he slurs, and Fenrir slides the end of his tongue just over the back of David's neck. Drag him back, oh yes, he will. Fenrir looks forward to it, and to finding out how David smells in morning sunshine. To crawl back into their bed, which smells of skin and fur and come, of *David*. He thinks that tomorrow they will walk back as man and wolf, David on two feet and Fenrir on four, with David's hand buried in the scruff of Fenrir's neck. It will look like ownership, to those who don’t know better, and Fenrir has never cared for what fools think.

Fenrir thinks only of the stories that will be told of them. The General and His Wolf. The Scion of the Greek Army, the Beast of the Nordic People. Fenrir will be moon-snatcher, beast of slaughter, where David will be witch-lover, witch-killer, beast-tamer, dragon-slayer. His image will fall prey to power and pretence and foolishness. The tales will become garbled, shaped for purpose and telling, by nation, by prose style. David will belong to the people, to legend, to time and all that passes through it.

But for now he is only Fenrir’s, and Fenrir will never see him any clearer than under moon- and starlight, sheltered in the trees.

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End file.
